As Wisconsin agencies cater to a major Scott Walker golf course developer/ donor by laying the groundwork for bulldozing a nature preserve and even privatizing some land in an adjoining, water-rich state park - - continuing a pattern boosted by a reckless opinion by Attorney General Brad Schimel and corporately-controlled GOP legislators whose actions further embed private control of wetlands and pristine timber acreage and drinking water into special-interest hands - - we should all remember that decades ago the Wisconsin Supreme Court warned against this very short-shortsightedness when it affirmed that Wisconsin's waters belong to everyone:
We've been warned. The Walkerites are ignoring it, carelessly, intentionally and self-servingly.
"A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body may be eaten away until it may no longer exist. Our navigable waters are a precious natural heritage, once gone, they disappear forever," wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in its 1960 opinion resolving Hixon v. PSC and buttressing The PublicTrust Doctrine, Article IX of the Wisconsin State Constitution...This permanent loss of the people's water and everything the water supports is exactly what is happening at the Lake Michigan shoreline golf course proposal moves along apace, or when more and more industrial-scale feedlots are opened at the expense of the land and the groundwater, or when more and more sand mines are gouged out from woodland stands and the wetlands holding and filtering the people's waters.
We've been warned. The Walkerites are ignoring it, carelessly, intentionally and self-servingly.